You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design.
Recent Posts
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What is a Daniel Cook Game?
A teammate asked me the damning question, “What is a Daniel Cook game?” I didn’t have a good answer. He was looking for some understanding of the influences behind the things we make. In his mind, there’s clearly a vein I’m mining when I lead…
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Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer
This paper was originally published here as part of the Polaris Game Design Retreat 2022 papers. Posted here to ensure to help defend against far…
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Appliance Gaming 2020
(Note: This was written for the Games of 2020 content put on by Game Developer magazine. I won a free ticket to GDC 2009.) The…
Popular Posts
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Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies
INTRODUCTION The problem with picking up sticks Recently I was designing the harvesting and crafting system for our Animal Crossing-like game Cozy Grove when I ran into a problem: picking up a stick is not that fun. The core activities in a life sim are…
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List of Game Artists
A very large number of game developers come to Lostgarden looking for game art. (Apparently I’m on the first page of results if you search…
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How to bootstrap your indie art needs
A goodly number of indie game developers are lured into Lostgarden.com by the free game graphics. Every few days an email pops into my inbox,…
All Posts
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What is a Daniel Cook Game?
A teammate asked me the damning question, “What is a Daniel Cook game?” I didn’t have a good answer. He was looking for some understanding…
-
Appliance Gaming 2020
(Note: This was written for the Games of 2020 content put on by Game Developer magazine. I won a free ticket to GDC 2009.) The…
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A design practice for social systems
The following essay was originally posted in ACM Journal Games: Research and Practice (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3583184) Reposted here to provide a more accessible copy with better formatting.…
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The Letter Circle
A thought that has been stewing for a while is “What is a form of social media I’d be willing to use?” So here is…
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Closed social affordances / Open social affordances in social systems design
Introduction In social systems design, we often need to control how different players interact with one another. We want to heavily mediate griefing and toxicity…
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Kindness
So much mentoring I do is asking folks to treat themselves with kindness. Overwork, anxiety, external and internal pressure can put us into a dark…
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The Workshopping Skill
How do you cultivate a wildly productive generative engine of design creativity. Especially one detached from your ego? Design in this case means coming up…
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The trap of adding combat to your game
A thing I’ve realized making non-combat focused games is how expensive combat mechanics often end up being in the end. If you add combat… “The…